The obsolete turret problem

[starholme]

You should destroy the biggest nests biters have created in your pollution cloud. it would make things a LOT easier for your turrets.

Agreed. In my first game we kept getting hit about 2 -3 times per day cycle. We went around in tanks and killed everything. Not a single attack after that.

Once you are at end game tech, you need something to spend all those resources on anyway. Why not piles of AP ammo/replacement walls/gun turrets? Gives a pretty reasonable resource sink, but only if you keep those nearby bases.

[NoriSilverrage]

Just wanted to throw my two cents in here.

Early game ammo turrets are great. They fall off later not because of damage output but because of cost and logistic complexity. 5 copper and 5 iron for 10 bullets doesn't compare to nearly free energy. And this doesn't even talk about the logistic complexity. When a single attack can drain dozens of magazines...
I think it could very easily be "fixed" by having a later game tech that increases magazine size. Call it a manufacturing refinement upgrade that allows more bullets because of less waste. Something along the lines of 1.5x, and 2x the bullets.

Next would be range and health, again having a tech that added 1,2 (3?) range and 1.5x, 2x health would be nice. But could just have a mk2 turret with a few more range and some nice health boosts.
It is quite odd to me that a "mechanical" gun turret has far less ability to take damage than a "fragile" laser turret.
If we parallel this to real life, high tech in the battlefield frequently fails, but simple firearms are quite reliable and resilient.

[orzelek]

Basically game is missing some variant of sniper turrets added by mods.
They have 2 quite important benefits:
1. Range is higher then lasers or at least comparable.
2. They are very ammo efficient. Low fire rate with high multiplier means dps similar to gun turret but much more efficient.

Drawback of them is that they don't work well against swarms of small enemies(lots of damage lost to overkill) but they will make short work of behemots (and do that efficiently).

Some kind of railgun or simply high caliber canno type of turret would be really useful for endgame fighting.

[bobucles]

I have played that mod with sniper turrets. They basically wipe the floor over any other turret option. A long range, high power, low cost alpha strike weapon is quite simply a win all.

[mooklepticon]

And one that unlocks APFSDS ammo (Armor Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding-Sabot) (that uses existing AP Magazines + 1 Iron Plating as production cost with a blue color coding) that doesn't add to the turret physical DPS (or even decreases it a bit) but it does increase its range to make it relevant vs laser turret defenses (+10 range?)

Alternatively, high explosive ammo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor-pie ... ell#Shells has a few examples. Good consumption of late-game explosives.

[mooklepticon]

50% shorter range than lasers is what makes turrets obsolete. Nothing less, nothing more.

No, not at all. A combination of both is nice. Gun Turrets front, Laser Turrets right behind, and no matter what big waves are coming -> short work, without lasers getting in trouble due to low firing speed.

I do lasers in front. They're better meat shields for the spitters. Guns do nicely against any biters that make it through.

[mooklepticon]

Just wanted to throw my two cents in here.

Early game ammo turrets are great. They fall off later not because of damage output but because of cost and logistic complexity. 5 copper and 5 iron for 10 bullets doesn't compare to nearly free energy. And this doesn't even talk about the logistic complexity.

Okay, I know that video games aren't supposed to be realistic, but that's outright implausible. That amount of material makes large buildings or a few bullets? That's just crazy. I get that it's for balance, but that's stretching it, still.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Here's something you guys seem to be missing: gun turrets fall behind against bigger biters if they aren't upgraded, but stay ahead (at least in applied DPS) if they are upgraded high enough. The problem I have with it is that the biters' physical resistance is entirely as an amount reduction, no percentage reduction (the behemoth biter has only 20% reduction). With no damage upgrades, a gun turret deals only 20% of its DPS vs a big biter, but with full damage upgrade--I've been told it deals around 48 damage per bullet--it retains ~83% of its DPS. It's a world of difference here: the later biters are virtually immune to turrets without upgrades, and die super fast to turrets with high upgrades. Why not give the biters some percentage physical damage reduction, and reduce the amount physical damage reduction? It'll improve gun turrets at the low end and they won't be obsolete, and it'll also weaken gun turrets at the high end so they aren't quite so overpowered.

[Frightning]

Gun turrets benefit from turret upgrades AND ammo upgrades.
Laser turrets benefit only from turrets upgrade.

One fully upgraded laser shot from laser turret makes 11 damage
One fully upgraded piercing shot from a gun turret makes 24.2 damage
24.2 damage is more than 11 - even mitigated by 20% (19.36 mitigated)

And ... have I talked about firing speed ?

Laser turrets have the advantage of easiness : plop a bunch of them, add power poles, and you're done. Gun turrets must be reloaded, so you need some logistics to provide them magazines and reload them.

With both full gun turret damage and full bullet damage upgrades, it's actually 48.4 (100% bonus damage that gun turrets have doubles it). For this reason, Gun Turrets still handedly outDPS laser turrets even against behemoth biters (still more than 2x DPS, but laser turrets has 2.5x hp).

[golfmiketango]

[off-topic brainstorm that was here removed; relocation to somewhere appropriate planned]

[thereaverofdarkness]

With both full gun turret damage and full bullet damage upgrades, it's actually 48.4 (100% bonus damage that gun turrets have doubles it). For this reason, Gun Turrets still handedly outDPS laser turrets even against behemoth biters (still more than 2x DPS, but laser turrets has 2.5x hp).

After Behemoth Biter resistances, it comes out to 30.72. The laser turret's maximum damage is 44 which as far as I can tell is not reduced at all by the biter's resistances. If my math is right, this comes out to a DPS count of 303.6 vs Behemoth Biter (6.9 shots per second), vs. a gun turret's 706.56 (23 shots per second). There is no arguing that the gun turret deals obscenely high damage to endgame biters when it's fully upgraded.

A more important point to make, however, is that a gun turret with fewer upgrades does FAR less damage because it is mitigated so strongly by biters' armor.
Here I will list the damage of a gun turret per shot | damage to a big biter | damage to a behemoth biter | DPS to behemoth biter as percentage of laser turret with same damage upgrades
Damage+turret upgrade 0: 10.0 | 02.0 | 00.50 | 008.33%
Damage+turret upgrade 1: 12.1 | 04.1 | 01.68 | 025.45%
Damage+turret upgrade 2: 14.4 | 06.4 | 03.52 | 048.89%
Damage+turret upgrade 3: 19.6 | 11.6 | 07.68 | 091.43%
Damage+turret upgrade 4: 25.6 | 17.6 | 12.48 | 130.00%
Damage+turret upgrade 5: 32.4 | 24.4 | 17.92 | 165.93%
Damage+turret upgrade 6: 48.4 | 40.4 | 30.72 | 232.73%

As you can see from the last column, the DPS ratio between gun turrets and laser turrets against end-game biters is highly dependent on upgrades, with the very last damage upgrades being where the gun turret finally really shines. If you have everything upgraded to level 4, the gun turrets barely out-DPS the lasers, and with all level 3 upgrades, the lasers actually have higher DPS.


This is why I think biters should have a lower absorption amount on their armor, and instead should have a higher percentage physical resist. This would not only make gun turrets do better in the lower upgrade ranges, but it would make them do worse at higher upgrades. All in all, it could push their applied DPS closer to laser turrets. I think assuming all your turrets have equal upgrade levels, gun turrets should deal in the ballpark of 50% more applied DPS than laser turrets, though it'll also vary further by evolution level vs your upgrade level.

[Frightning]

With both full gun turret damage and full bullet damage upgrades, it's actually 48.4 (100% bonus damage that gun turrets have doubles it). For this reason, Gun Turrets still handedly outDPS laser turrets even against behemoth biters (still more than 2x DPS, but laser turrets has 2.5x hp).

After Behemoth Biter resistances, it comes out to 30.72. The laser turret's maximum damage is 44 which as far as I can tell is not reduced at all by the biter's resistances. If my math is right, this comes out to a DPS count of 303.6 vs Behemoth Biter (6.9 shots per second), vs. a gun turret's 706.56 (23 shots per second). There is no arguing that the gun turret deals obscenely high damage to endgame biters when it's fully upgraded.

A more important point to make, however, is that a gun turret with fewer upgrades does FAR less damage because it is mitigated so strongly by biters' armor.
Here I will list the damage of a gun turret per shot | damage to a big biter | damage to a behemoth biter | DPS to behemoth biter as percentage of laser turret with same damage upgrades
Damage+turret upgrade 0: 10.0 | 02.0 | 00.50 | 008.33%
Damage+turret upgrade 1: 12.1 | 04.1 | 01.68 | 025.45%
Damage+turret upgrade 2: 14.4 | 06.4 | 03.52 | 048.89%
Damage+turret upgrade 3: 19.6 | 11.6 | 07.68 | 091.43%
Damage+turret upgrade 4: 25.6 | 17.6 | 12.48 | 130.00%
Damage+turret upgrade 5: 32.4 | 24.4 | 17.92 | 165.93%
Damage+turret upgrade 6: 48.4 | 40.4 | 30.72 | 232.73%

As you can see from the last column, the DPS ratio between gun turrets and laser turrets against end-game biters is highly dependent on upgrades, with the very last damage upgrades being where the gun turret finally really shines. If you have everything upgraded to level 4, the gun turrets barely out-DPS the lasers, and with all level 3 upgrades, the lasers actually have higher DPS.


This is why I think biters should have a lower absorption amount on their armor, and instead should have a higher percentage physical resist. This would not only make gun turrets do better in the lower upgrade ranges, but it would make them do worse at higher upgrades. All in all, it could push their applied DPS closer to laser turrets. I think assuming all your turrets have equal upgrade levels, gun turrets should deal in the ballpark of 50% more applied DPS than laser turrets, though it'll also vary further by evolution level vs your upgrade level.

Fire rate at max upgrades is 260% of base, not 230%, also, be sure to apply % resistance before flat resistance (which the wiki has down backwards in their formula). I ran the numbers in a different thread and I got about 750 DPS for gun turret to just over 300 for laser against behemoth biter w/ full upgrades. The big reason the gun turret varies so much with upgrades isn't just the biter resistances, but also the fact that the gun turret has two lines of damage upgrades instead of 1 like the laser turret, and those separate upgrade lines stack multiplicatively with one another (and multiplicatively with innate 100% bonus damage).

Flat resistance like factorio has can be a challenge to balance, but other games have managed to do it well (Starcraft 1 for instance has a purely subtractive armor system that works exactly like flat resistance does in this game).

[thereaverofdarkness]

Fire rate at max upgrades is 260% of base, not 230%, also, be sure to apply % resistance before flat resistance (which the wiki has down backwards in their formula). I ran the numbers in a different thread and I got about 750 DPS for gun turret to just over 300 for laser against behemoth biter w/ full upgrades.

I did a lot of the numbers in my head. I might have got some of it wrong but I think I have the method right. Looking back, I'm not sure how I arrived at 130% bonus fire rate, I count 160% now. :/

The big reason the gun turret varies so much with upgrades isn't just the biter resistances, but also the fact that the gun turret has two lines of damage upgrades instead of 1 like the laser turret, and those separate upgrade lines stack multiplicatively with one another (and multiplicatively with innate 100% bonus damage).

Yeah, I think they should take out turret damage upgrades, since there are already bullet damage upgrades--or make the gun turrets not get the bullet damage upgrades.

Flat resistance like factorio has can be a challenge to balance, but other games have managed to do it well (Starcraft 1 for instance has a purely subtractive armor system that works exactly like flat resistance does in this game).

Starcraft doesn't make heavy use of that armor, and very rarely are any attacks almost completely mitigated. In fact the only case I can think of is zerglings with no upgrades vs. heavy armor units with full armor upgrades.

I like that Factorio has some attacks almost completely mitigated, but I think more care should be taken to understand how the upgrades will play out.

[Incendax]

The logistics are not too bad.

I build a giant belt around my ENTIRE base, and attach an ammo factory to it. Bullets fill up the belt, which means the inserters are loading even while the guns are firing. I pretty much have the whole belt backed up with ammo all the time.

I use laser turrets at my unconnected satellite bases.

[malecord]

The logistics are not too bad.

I build a giant belt around my ENTIRE base, and attach an ammo factory to it. Bullets fill up the belt, which means the inserters are loading even while the guns are firing. I pretty much have the whole belt backed up with ammo all the time.

I use laser turrets at my unconnected satellite bases.

I used belts only in the introductory missions.

In my first open world game I remember deploying gun turrets with requester chest and inserters. Now I modded in logistic turrets.

The problem of gun turrets late game is the low range low health combination. Basically you're forced to keep em in front of the lasers or they won't hit spitters. But they have very low health do they always die.

I've just modded in my tier2 increased range (19, laser is 25) increased health (1000 like laser) logistic gun turrets and now things work as they should work: a bunch of lasers to get enemy aggro from distance and then 3-4 guns to make short work of the pesky bugs when they come near.